Although officially international/English sala21 shows it's
Portuguese roots everywhere. When I first loaded it I was
surprised
by the loading counter in the center of the screen which took about 30
seconds to get to 100% before anything could be seen. It's like
those "Flash Intros" that were hot a few years ago on some sites, but in
this case there is no "Skip.." button as you have to let it load.

Basically the entire webcam chat system seems to be within Flash,
which has both good and bad aspects. On the one hand it allows a
very novel and different user interface. On the other hand it
allows a very novel and different user interface.

Seriously
though, different can be good but it can also be confusing, and at first
I found the interface extremely confusing. Although the system
detected I wasn't in a Portuguese country and switched me to the
"English" version of the system still has a few Portuguese words here and
there but you get used to it after a while.

Finally the site did load and showed me that 8 chatrooms were online,
of which half were in free chat. Clicking on the thumbnail took me
straight into a room without delay, no signup or loading or anything,
very fast and accompanied by a "boom" sound. Luckily you can
turn off the various strange noises it makes with a little box at the
bottom of the screen marked "Sounds".

The "Help"
box though I'm not sure what that does. Perhaps it is the little
help messages like:

The little
flag gives you choices of Portuguese, of course, both Portugal and
Brazilian flags, then German, English, Spanish and finally French.
The system worked out I needed English automatically, I'm not sure how.

A prompt for "Free Signup" appeared, but I think this was on a timer
as it kept appearing and I could easily close it and get back to the
chat, or rather watching and reading because as an unregistered guest I
could not type at all.

A
lot of the site looks like it was designed by someone who normally does
video games. The controls are not at all obvious, like what does
this circle with symbols on it do? You can guess a few such as
Home and Favorite as those are common icons, but you would be wrong.
Point your mouse cursor at them and you'll find that the Heart is
actually for Tipping. Yes this is a tipping site though I also saw
plenty of privates going on. Thumbnails of online but in private
hosts are clearly marked as being in private, with a number after which
I presume means how many viewers there are as it always seems to be "1"
for privates.

Like any new site they are keen to get more models and so quite a bit
of the promotions are inviting models to join, and I'll talk more about
that later in the Models part of this review.

As
a viewer though you finally need to make a free account if you want to
interact with the chathosts, so click the register button then choose
"Customer" and there are three pages to go through, a benefit screen
which is rather redundant if you have already decided to join, the
actual form and a T&C "I agree" page. Now I know that nobody ever
reads the terms and conditions before clicking "I Agree", but that
doesn't mean you have to make it so small it is unreadable. At
Sala21 it looks like they have scanned a printed document and put the
scans into a little window, you can page through but you'll have to
either Zoom in or get real close to the screen to read the words.
Or maybe the person who designed this has a much bigger monitor than me
and it's ok for him!

The signup form itself is username, password, email and then you
click next and
"Register". You can login as soon as you have completed the
form, you don't need to wait, but take care you only click the login
button once, not twice as I did and accidentally logged myself in then
out again before I realized it.
Click the
button and wait patiently for a few seconds even though nothing seems to
have happened after a while you will be logged in and the login button
changes to a logout button.

When
I first logged in I was suprised by the weird pop-ups that look more
like some debugging code than a normal website.

Luckily they disappear on their own even without you clicking "close"
on them, which is good as they are quite annoying.

When you get the confirmation email it is subject " [INFO]
Sala21.com: Bem vindo | Welcome " and just contains your username
and password, there is no email verification going on.

To buy credits click the little globe icon under the $ sign to select
where you are in the world, then it will offer you payment types.

Credit card handling is via Zambio and you can buy packages of
credits starting at 10 Euros for 480 credits through to 100 Euros which
gets you 4,800, plus a 15% bonus. If you sign up for a monthly 25
Euro purchase you get a 5% bonus, no different from if you just buy 25
euros at a time.

So if 10 euros buys 480 credits, and privates are 60 credits a
minute, and one euro is about $1.25 then... I think I should have
studied mathematics harder. No, I think that means privates are
about $1.50/minute. Which is cheap, very cheap, down there with
camcontacts.

Nude chat is half that price.

Problem is of course that there are not that many hosts online, so
you don't have a lot of choices. After spending some time looking
around most of them had logged off and the two "free chat" rooms still
going were both just sofa-cams, the models having left their cameras
running while they went off.

Even when there are hosts online you are limited to 20 minutes in
free for ever 2 hours you are online. You can raise that limit by
spending even a little bit in private or nude chat. Just one
minute of private gets you 2 hours of unlimited free. But this
doesn't help if there are are no hosts in free.

Then several of the free chat hosts I saw were just sitting there
typing, not even showing their face or talking to their viewers.
And what typing that was happening was mostly in Portuguese or some in
Spanish.

Even room titles are in Portuguese: what does "ola meninos vote em
mim...obg" mean? It's something like "vote for me boys".

A
few times the whole site crashed and I got the little dead flash icon

I tried to talk to some of the hosts in Free chat but they either
could not or would not respond in English. They were not even
showing their face so it wasn't really possible to get into some feeling
of conversation with them.

So basically despite the effort to internationalize the site I think
Sala21 is really only for Portuguese speakers, and ones who are willing
to learn this unusual user interface.

You don't need to speak Portuguese to work here, but it would help.
There is a "model earnings calculator" which lets you simulate how much
you would earn doing different amounts of hours there.

To signup use the same "Register" button as for a customer, but then
on the next screen chose "Model". They boast that you can work
without showing your face, which is a bit strange for such a site, but I
guess it is good for privacy. This is unusual for US cam sites but
I know that for example Japanese sites like DXLive
have many girls who don't show their face.

One great things it that they send payouts every 3 days, but how much
you actually earn is confusing to see. The promise of "up to 80%
net payouts" is confusing. According to the terms and conditions
the payout is 0.60 euros per minute or about 75 cents a minute which is
more like 60% I think, you also get 70% of tips.

There is also voting and and weekly and monthly prizes for top voted,
2nd and 3rd places models. But you can't guarantee those and the
prizes are small anyway. At most 50 euros for monthly first place.
This is trivial compared to chaturbates
hourly prizes.